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Primary Documents - Count Bernstorff on German Spying in the U.S., 1914-17

Reproduced below is
Count
von Bernstorff's memoir of the many charges of spying and
industrial espionage that were laid at the German government's door during
his tenure as German Ambassador to the U.S. While not denying that
some espionage took place Bernstorff suggested that these were invariably
overstated.

German Ambassador to the
U.S. Count von Bernstorff's Account of Alleged Spying in America

Shortly after the outbreak
of the war Great Britain's naval superiority enabled its war vessels upon
foreign stations to prevent German reservists in North and South America
from returning to their native land.

This caused German citizens
and German-Americans in the United States to resort to measures which,
though not directed primarily against the American Government, violated the
laws of that country. Over and above this, several acts of violence
were committed against Germany's enemies at different points in the course
of 1915, and preparations were made for other similar deeds, which likewise
constituted more or less serious violations of the American laws.

All these plots were
employed to our damage, being designated as German conspiracies against
American neutrality. The agitation they aroused injured the German
cause, and in particular the policy I had adopted.

A prominent instance in
which the laws of the country were broken without direct acts of violence,
occurred when the New York branch of the Hamburg-American Line, acting upon
instructions from the head office in Hamburg, dispatched about a dozen
chartered vessels with coal and provisions to meet German cruisers and
auxiliary cruisers upon the high seas.

These vessels were declared
for foreign ports lying beyond the points on the high seas where they were
to meet German vessels. When it was discovered later that the New York
agents of the Hamburg-American Line had thus coaled our warships, they were
indicted for knowingly swearing to false declarations. Their honoured
chief, Dr. Bunz, and three other members of the firm were sentenced to
eighteen months' imprisonment.

Furthermore, several German
reserve officers who chanced to be in America were able to get home, in
spite of the sharp watch Great Britain kept over sea traffic, through a
secret office organized in New York by a German-American named Von Wedell,
and later managed by Karl Ruroede, which provided them with counterfeit or
forged American passports.

This bureau was broken up
by the American Department of Justice when four German reservists possessing
such passports were taken off a Norwegian ship in New York harbour.
Wedell is alleged to have fled from New York some time before, to have been
captured by the British, and to have been drowned by the sinking of a
transport. The reservists escaped with heavy fines. Ruroede was
sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

These actions by the
Hamburg-American Line and the false passport office had already done the
German cause great harm in America, when it was injured far more seriously
by the acts of destruction committed by German citizens and German-Americans
in America against our enemies.

Any person free from
prejudice would have recognized that in the cases where such acts were
proved, they were undertaken on private initiative. They were the mad
enterprises of hot-headed patriots and not conspiracies organized or
approved officially by representatives of Germany.

Innumerable other alleged
plots were pure fictions of the imagination without the slightest basis of
fact. Every accident which occurred in an American munition works -
and a mushroom growth of such enterprises covered the country, operated in
the vast majority of cases by inexperienced and unskilled workers - was
invariably ascribed to German agents.

Apparently I was held
responsible for at least permitting these atrocities to be committed under
the direction of officers or secret agents to the Embassy. In order to
prove this several cipher telegrams from the German War Office to the
Embassy in Washington were deciphered in England, which were alleged to
counsel such acts on Canadian soil.

I do not know whether these
dispatches were genuine or not. Military cipher telegrams addressed,
"Attention, Military Attaché," did indeed reach the Embassy in great
numbers, but were invariably forwarded at once to the office of Captain Von
Papen in New York without my knowing their contents.

Mr. Von Papen, very
naturally, never informed me of any instructions he might have received from
his superiors to arrange for questionable enterprises of the character
indicated. Without further evidence I do not consider it to have been
proved that such instructions were received by him.

But in regard to these
questions I can only speak for myself; for I never concerned myself with
purely military matters. Soon after Captain Von Papen started home I
energetically protested against the government's sending a successor,
because I considered that with a situation such as existed in America, there
was nothing for a military attaché to do, and that the presence of such an
officer at the Embassy would merely feed enemy agitation.

I never knew at the time
what secret agents, who might have been sent to the United States by the
German military authorities, were possibly doing in violation of the laws of
the country, either under explicit instructions or through exceeding their
instructions. Neither have I been able to learn anything under this
head since returning to Germany.